Luck of the Dead
by Spydrops
Summary: A slightly darker Ranma/Naruto crossover. Warning: Lock-fic, sorta


**Chapter One**

She was tired. No, she was bone weary. It felt as if leaden weights had been tied around her ankles. And she was sure, despite distant memories of swimming vast distances, that if she were to find herself in a body of water now, she would quickly drown.

She kept her eyes on the ground. Every step was an effort. Left foot, then right foot; that was her mantra. It did not help that her body was so small. She was a child, yet not a child. She was too tired to make sense of it. Perhaps if she just stopped for a moment and rested, she would find the energy to think, and it would all become clear. But if she stopped, she might never start up again.

Left foot, then right foot. That was all that she could do.

It couldn't last.

She didn't know what troubled her more, a death that seemed increasingly inevitable – she had lost a lot of blood after all, was probably still bleeding - or the thought of her body being swallowed up by the land, never to be found. In her mind she could already see the insects burrowing into her flesh. How quickly would they make her disappear?

Abruptly her legs stopped moving, and she stared down at them in confusion. She had not told them to stop.

She must have blacked out then, for the next thing she knew she was lying on her back, her arms splayed out beside her - a wind up doll that no-one would ever find to wind back up.

Above her the sky was grey with the promise of thunder.

As the tethers of lucidity began to slip, and she fell into that murky veil that lay between reality and dreams, she raised her arms up above her, as a child would - that wordless plea to be picked up, comforted, and protected from all the darkness and pain that the world had to offer.

Her small hands were wet, red.

If it rained she would be glad.

She closed her eyes.

* * *

He leapt from tree branch to tree branch, a practiced fluidity to his movements. He was returning home. He should be glad, but he wasn't.

He frowned beneath his ANBU mask.

Over the years, he had spent less and less time in his home village, and more time across the Land of Fire and beyond. It was through no fault of his own; ANBU did not get to pick and choose missions like the rest of Konoha's forces did during times of relative peace. They had to take any and all missions assigned to them by the Hokage. As an ANBU captain and an individual operative, Kakashi had an unparalleled success rate. As a consequence of this the Hokage often requested his presence on key missions, leaving Kakashi with little down-time. Somewhere along the line, he had grown used to this, and now he felt more at home out in field in the company bloodshed and violence, than he did within the relative safety of Konoha's walls.

Briefly his gaze flickered upwards, towards the darkened sky. Grey thunder-heads hung ominously overhead, blotting out the evening sun and draining the color from the world. He could smell the impending downpour - minutes away at most.

His eyes narrowed abruptly, as his nose picked up something else in the air. Blood.

He veered from his intended route, dropping to the forest floor and landing in a crouch. Kunai clutched in hand, he stalked forward. Only the steady rustle of leaves punctured the silence. Spots of dull light danced across the moss covered ground, as the canopy swayed above him. The scent of blood grew stronger with every step. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. He moved slowly around the trunk of a tree wider than he was tall, then came to a halt as he caught sight of something - a patch of crimson two dozen yards ahead. Not blood, he realized, but hair, and attached to it was a body too small to belong even to a genin.

A child - female, four to five years in age. She lay upon her back with her long hair fanning out around her. Her eyes were closed. It would seem almost as if she were sleeping were it not for the foot long serrated blade that skewered her abdomen.

She was still breathing, he noted, but it was fast and shallow, and her skin was deathly pale - blood loss, no doubt extensive. For her to be alive after receiving such wounds meant that they had been inflicted recently.

He stepped backwards, deeper into the shadows.

His gaze flickered around him, but there were only endless trees. There were no other scents either, apart from those belonging to himself, the forest, and the girl. He briefly halted the flow of chakra in his body, but nothing changed - no genjutsu then. It did not put him at ease.

The scene before him stirred up old memories, ones of the Third Ninja War.

He remembered how certain ninja had started rigging the bodies of children, often injured in the chaos of battle but sometimes deliberately wounded, with explosive notes, as well as other more elaborate traps. It hadn't taken long for those involved in the war to begin ignoring the cries of any injured child they might come across.

He crouched down and brought his fingers into a ram seal. A doppelganger of himself blinked into existence before him. He sent the chakra construct towards the child with orders to investigate. Wary of getting caught in any trap mechanism his shadow clone might inadvertently trigger, he used an earth technique to retreat several meters below ground, where he could wait in relative safety for the clone to finish its task. He did not have to wait long though. An infusion of chakra and memories signaled the clone's demise, much earlier than he expected.

The memories he received only furthered his suspicion. There had been no outright attack on the clone, but once it had gotten within several yards of the child it had inexplicably lost stability and collapsed. Further still, only a fraction of the chakra he had used to form the clone had returned to him with its destruction.

He reasoned that this could be due to a bloodline, one that destabilized and absorbed chakra when in close proximity. However, it could also be a facet of some unconventional trap – such as a hidden sealing array. He was no fuinjutsu master, but he knew there were plenty of seals that effected chakra.

Still underground, he moved further away from the scene before tunneling back to surface. Without bothering to shake off the crumbs of earth that clung to his hooded cloak, he ran up the trunk of the nearest tree. Once he reached the lowest branch, he summoned another shadow clone. This one he instructed to simply watch and wait. Not that he expected it to see much other than the girls eventual death. The level of uncertainty here precluded him from intervening.

With a single glance back to memorize the setting, Kakashi leapt off the branch and resumed his journey. He would alert the appropriate people when he arrived in Konoha. No doubt a team with a Hyuuga would be sent out to safely investigate and recover the body.

It began to rain.


End file.
